Should Forging Jobshops Adopt, or Adapt, Lean Manufacturing?
What is Lean Manufacturing? It is a manufacturing philosophy that shortens the total lead time between the receipt of a customer order and the shipment of that order to the customer by eliminating waste. Anytime that an order is delayed, the cost of one or more of the Seven Types of Wastes overproduction, performance of non-standardized work, queue time, transportation (or material handling) time, inventory (raw material, WIP and finished goods), unnecessary motions and travel, defective products and underutilized (workforce) skills gets added to the cost of producing the order, which reduces the profits it earns for the supplier. Hence, for the typical forgings supplier doing business with the DLA and/or DOD, the adoption of Lean Manufacturing would minimize the Total Lead Time = Administrative Lead Time (ALT) + Production Lead Time (PLT) for any order. But, should forgings suppliers adopt those Lean Manufacturing programs such as Manufacturing Cells, Setup Reduction, Process Standard
